North Dakota still has a major donut hole in affordability, however — there is a gap of over $2800 (even more, for older people) between the highest income for Medicaid coverage and the point where the cheapest plan on the market is affordable.

If HealthCare.gov worked as advertised, and the federal subsidy factored in, it’d hardly be an issue. But there are still applications — including mine — that just haven’t gone through.

President Obama highlighted transportation infrastructure in a speech in St. Paul Union Station, and the need for Congress to provide steady funding for the nation’s transportation networks in the face of stagnant fuel tax levies in a nation slowly but surely becoming less dependent on the gas pump.

I have to applaud North Dakota Game and Fish for setting up a webcast of their meeting tonight. Even better, they pledge to have a video recording available afterward. Here’s hoping that more and more state agencies follow their lead in expanding the public record.

Even as the overworked legislature nearly went into overtime last year, there were calls for annual meetings. Careful scheduling could work around North Dakota’s 80-day legislative straightjacket in future bienniums.

The long-promised lawsuit against the Manitoba Government’s questionable sales tax hike has finally hit the court docket. The NDP is accusing it of grandstanding, but the timeline and letter of the law appear to be consistent with what the Tories allege — the 1% PST hike was and is illegal. Still, Canada’s murky constitutional law may yet save the NDP government an embarrassing defeat.

While certain oilmen are out there being responsible, there’s a large enough number doing illegal dumping, registering shell companies, and most of those are going to ruin fields, rivers, and lakes and get away with it. If neither the industry nor the legislature of North Dakota is setting aside money to bear the costs of cleanup and environmental protection, then the craters left in western North Dakota are likely to be permanent scars.

The great and lasting triumph of the William Guy administration was prevent the coal industry from turning North Dakota into a moonscape. Today, there are precious few in Bismarck that have such moral stature, but through the initiative process, North Dakotans can at least get to vote on a measure of needed insurance against the growing damage of the energy industry.